In Spring of 1977, The Paris Review, published an interview with Kurt Vonnegut.
The interview is a composite of four question and answer sessions with the writer, and edited by Vonnegut himself. Therefore, what he has to say in this “interview” is not as off-the-cuff as it might seem. Rather, it’s intentional, as most text-based exercises are.
INTERVIEWER
You have been a public relations man and an advertising man—
VONNEGUT
Oh, I imagine.
INTERVIEWER
Was this painful? I mean—did you feel your talent was being wasted, being crippled?
VONNEGUT
No. That’s romance—that work of that sort damages a writer’s soul. At Iowa, Dick Yates and I used to give a lecture each year on the writer and the free-enterprise system. The students hated it. We would talk about all the hack jobs writers could take in case they found themselves starving to death, or in case they wanted to accumulate enough capital to finance the writing of a book. Since publishers aren’t putting money into first novels anymore, and since the magazines have died, and since television isn’t buying from young freelancers anymore, and since the foundations give grants only to old poops like me, young writers are going to have to support themselves as shameless hacks. Otherwise, we are soon going to find ourselves without a contemporary literature. There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs do to writers, and that is to waste their precious time.
After studying anthropology at University of Chicago, Vonnegut took a job working in PR for General Electric. His choice to earn is only one reason why I love him, but it is an important one. “It was dishonorable enough that I perverted art for money. I then topped that felony by becoming, as I say, fabulously well-to-do,” Vonnegut reflects.
It’s wonderful to know that Vonnegut thinks having a hack job doesn’t hurt your writing, it just sucks up your time. One might argue then, that a writer with a hack job merely needs to make time for their real work, while simultaneously performing the tasks that pay. I might add here that a writer can also work to transcend the hackery. Sure, it can become a head-banger of a challenge to write ad copy, or news copy, that does its job and delivers on craft and artfulness. But it’s a pursuit that strengthens the writer, in my opinion.
I can see where Vonnegut, or another writer, might claim that transcending the hackery isn’t the point, the point is simply to make money and return home to your family and the book that’s growing there, trying desperately to be born. My counterpoint is why make such harsh lines between real writing and writing merely to earn? Why not write it all with great care?
Ray Bradbury is spectacular. His mind is immense and his advice for other writers is both generous and magnificent.
In 2001, Bradbury spoke at the Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University. He was 80 years old at the time. Today is he 91.
During this talk, he says, “Writing is not a serious business, it’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun at it. It is not work. If it’s work, stop it and do something else.”
“I’ve never worked a day in my life,” Bradbury says “The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me my joy.”
Bradbury prescribes a routine that includes writing one short story a week. He also suggests that we fill our minds with lots of ideas from all disciplines, and that we read one short story, one poem and one essay each night before bed. He cautions that most modern literature will not suffice, because it is crap. To avoid the crap trap, Bradbury suggests the short stories of Roald Dahl, Guy de Maupassant, John Cheever, Richard Matheson, Nigel Kneel, John Collier, Edith Wharton, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He also loves the essays of George Bernard Shaw, and suggests we locate a copy of Do we agree?: A debate between G. K. Chesterton and Bernard Shaw.
Bradbury favors the provocative statement, which make listening to him fun. For instance, he says writers should not attend college. He also says he doesn’t plan, or outline, a story. Rather, he discovers it as he writes.
Bradbury has a sign above his work station that reads “Don’t Think.” This reminds him to keep his intellect at bay, and feel his way through the narrative.
Frankly, I can’t get enough of this wise man’s counsel. Which is why I went from the above video to the following two treasures from the mid-1970s and 1963, respectively.
Another important note from this writer of Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and many other books and screenplays deals with the dispatching of doubters. He advises that a writer can’t have any such people in his or her life, and that these friends and/or family must be fired if they insist on negative evaluations of one’s chosen path.
“Instrumental in traveling is the participation in it, the belief in progress, the witnessing of passage.” – Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers’ first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, is a travel journal with a lot of internal gyrations, a.k.a. dialogue from the narrator, whose mind “hovers and churns.” I just finished reading the 400-page book on the Kindle, and now I want to reflect on some of its themes and stylistic devices.
Will, the protagonist and narrator, departs Chicago O’Hare with his best bud Hand, for Senegal, Morocco, Estonia and Latvia. The trip is motivated by their friend’s death in a car accident and the consequent desire to offload $80,000 that Will came by unexpectedly (thanks to his silhouette being used on a new lightbulb package).
Adam Mars-Jones of The Observer notes that the book “might be a bleak and uneasy satire on American ignorance and cultural consumerism, with Will’s and Hand’s currency-scattering mission only slightly exaggerating the ridiculousness of over-ambitious holidays – If-this-is-Monday-this-must-be-Tallinn-or-maybe-Riga. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the intention. The title of the book is mystical-technical (finally explained as the motto of the Jumping People, an apocryphal South American tribe), but the style is pushy-flashy, dedicated to producing elaborate effects.”
That’s a solid read by Mars-Jones. The two characters are ridiculous in the way that two “normal dudes” who grew up in Milwaukee might be. Hand and Will are not Wayne and Garth, but they’re not all that far away from these overly-exaggerated characters.
Eggers makes some interesting choices in the construction of the book. He indicates to the reader when Will is talking to himself by placing an em dash in front of a thought. So, you’ll be reading along in a plot-driven passage, and then be dealt a series of dashes, with inner imaginings of the somewhat paranoid, totally addled narrator.
Eggers also time shifts the story, and puts the narrative in Hand’s hands about two-thirds of the way in, before circling back around for a Will-narrated finish. Which is weird, and a bit frustrating because Hand contradicts the things we as readers have come to believe. It does work to shed more light on the situation, but it’s not a fine light, where all looks happy and good.
Ultimately, You Shall Know Our Velocity, is a book with a message. The message is don’t waste time. And don’t run from things, like time, that can’t be outrun. It’s a wonderful philosophy, delivered by clowns in this instance, but that’s okay. We don’t always want our philosophies from a professor, poet or pundit.
Digital Book World is running an interview with Seth Godin, author of several best selling business books, including Unleashing the Ideavirus, The Bootstrapper’s Bible, Purple Cow, All Marketers Are Liars, Poke the Box, and more.
Here’s a slice of the interview, where Godin advises writers to walk way from their financial expectations.
Q. Many authors hear your message about being willing to give away their books for free, or to focus on spreading their message but their question is: “I’ve got rent to pay so how do I turn that into cash money?”
A. Who said you have a right to cash money from writing? I gave hundreds of speeches before I got paid to write one. I’ve written more than 4000 blog posts for free.
Poets don’t get paid (often), but there’s no poetry shortage. The future is going to be filled with amateurs, and the truly talented and persistent will make a great living. But the days of journeyman writers who make a good living by the word – over.
I don’t know how these halcyon days of writerly bounty could be over, if they never existed in the first place. The great majority of writers have always struggled to earn their way in the world. They either work odd jobs like bartender or taxicab driver, or they find a way to apply themselves as a teacher, or in a commercial setting like advertising, publishing, journalism or entertainment.
The future is going to be filled with amateurs, says Godin. And Mathew Ingram of GigaOm, commenting on Godin’s piece, is right to note “the rise of the amateur, powered by the democratization of distribution provided by the Web and social media.” Although “amateur” sounds more and more archaic to my ear each day. I prefer the word “apprentice.” There’s pro, semi-pro and apprentice. Apprentice captures seriousness of intent, in a way amateur does not.
Certainly, there are plenty of amateur writers, amateur photographers, and so on. Which is great, people need enriching hobbies. But the premise is about getting paid to write, and that’s why it makes sense to reframe the discussion around pro, semi-pro and apprentice. These are the people hoping to make money from their writing, and the people equipped to do so, via a mix of talent, training and good fortune.
Regarding Godin’s advice to offer content for free, I agree, as long as there’s a mix of paid and free in the writer’s bag. He says he’s offered more than 4000 blog posts for free. Great, I have offered more than 10,000 for free, but he also sells books, and I sell advertising (on AdPulp) and my writing there sometimes leads discerning readers to hire me to write copy for them. In other words, we get paid to write for free.
Thankfully, the buzz around free is starting to fade a bit. I’m actually happy to see so many newspapers begin to charge for their online editions. When you have exclusive content, as many city newspapers do, you can and should charge for it. The rise of eBooks is another game changer, where authors can and should charge a small price for their homemade digital book or booklet.
I do appreciate what Godin is saying, and it is good to approach your craft with humility. At the same time, a pro is a pro, and pros get paid. As do semi-pros, and on occasion, apprentices.
For a Gentile, Scott Carrier knows a lot about Mormons, having lived most of his 50-plus years in Salt Lake City. Carrier’s new book is titled Prisoner of Zion, which interestingly is something he’s perfectly willing (and happy) to be. The place does have a magnetic pull, no question about it.
His book of stories weaves tales of home with tales from Carrier’s adventures in war torn countries on the other side of the world. Both carry weight, but I particularly like his take on Utah and Mormon culture. I also think Carrier’s timing is good, as the closer Mitt Romney gets to the White House, the more people will want to know about the Latter Day Saints.
In “Inside the Momosphere” Carrier describes how when he was eight years old, his LDS friends told him about being baptized in the Mormon temple, and what it meant.
They told me they’d been baptized in the temple and now they were going to a different heaven than I was, unless I converted. They said there are three levels of heaven and they were going to the highest one, the Celestial Kingdom, but the best I could hope for was the second level, the Terrestrial Kingdom, which isn’t a bad place, just not the best place.
To reach the Celestial Kingdom is to become god-like yourself. So, you can see why Mormons have had, and continue to have, an adversarial relationship with people of other faiths. No one wants to be told their version of heaven, which they’re presently making great strides to reach, is second class.
And class is a campaign issue this year. Thanks to the wealth he has amassed, Romney’s life on earth is a bit finer than most Americans will ever know. But it doesn’t stop there, it’s not just about money. Because Romney is by all accounts, “a good Mormon,” he’s also headed for a better afterlife, one where he will achieve godliness, and I have to think that’s a problem, politically speaking.
—
At the end of the book, in a piece called, “Najibullah in America,” Carrier endeavors to describe the American-centric world view held by many Mormon students in his classes at Utah Valley University in Orem. For these students, there simply is no separation between church and state. No need.
Jesus Christ created the United States of America by raising up our founding fathers and guiding their hand in writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Once protections for religious freedom were in place, Jesus directed Joseph Smith to found an entirely new religion, restoring the true gospel, and begin building the Kingdom of God on Earth in preparation for His Second Coming.
That’s right, the pilgrims were just laying the groundwork for the intergalactic super show to be orchestrated, like a radio program, from Temple Square. But more importantly, America is for Jesus. Literally. When He comes back, He’s coming back to the America. So, naturally we must protect America at all costs from infidels, and keep funding the military at insane levels, which is a plank in the Romney campaign.
I know a lot of Jack Mormons, people who’ve thrown off the faith. I also know some good Mormons. They’re good people and I don’t want to see the kind of misunderstandings that might occur in this election season around religion. For instance, some conservative Christians, notably Southern Baptists, won’t admit the Mormons into the Christian brotherhood. Yet, Mormons are “busy building the Kingdom of God on Earth in preparation for His Second Coming.”
It may seem unfair to bring a man’s religion in to the campaign, but one’s ideas are often shaped by one’s faith. Therefore, it’s not just fair game, it is an essential part of considering where the person is coming from. Romney was a Mormon missionary in France. He knocked on doors in a Catholic nation that loves wine and sex. He knows what rejection looks like, which is good.
He also believes he’s living a righteous life, but it’s hard to know for sure if he is or isn’t. Just this morning he said he really doesn’t care all that much about the poor. He meant he wants to appeal to the middle class, but it didn’t come out that way. It came out like he’s callous and out of touch. The thing I wonder about is if it’s not all his fault, because a sense of superiority appears to be baked right into his cosmology.
[UPDATE] Reciting verses from The Bible this morning, President Obama responded to Romney’s comments about the poor, without having to call out Romney by name. He’s also clearly saying to Romney’s team and to the nation that he, President Obama, will be the good Christian in this race, thank you very much.
My buddy DK was here in Portland for the holidays. While dining at Zeus Cafe, he suggested that we could collaborate on a novel based on our experiences touring with Grateful Dead in the 1980s and 1990s. I like the idea a lot, and think the addition of a writing partner for this project would be particularly beneficial, as it will require much memory jogging and just as much vivid imagination.
DK, for his part, has his collection of hand-assembled Road Logs available for inspection (no small thing, considering DK and Anina’s house burned down a number of years ago). I too have some primary source materials to help ground the story in place and time. I also have the beginnings of a story written out in decades old drafts. My protagonist, Cody Timberlake of Salt Lake City, is a fan of the band and a pot-dealing ski bum with an East Coast education and beautiful friends.
Where might we take this character and the story now? To make a great novel, we need to adhere to the classic arch of a story and develop the necessary tension (plot twists) that holds it all together, before resolving with either a heartbreaking or heartwarming scene at the end. Naturally, we want to draw on the many real experiences we had during this ten-plus year period. In fact, I’m eager to simply record many of my true stories so they don’t fade into nothingness. Already too many years have passed, and that’s no doubt already changing the way we remember things and how we will present them. However, from a literary perspective, I feel that the distance we now have from these events will help us immensely. DK and I are not Tom Wolfe. We weren’t there as observers. And a composite view pieced together from many accounts, versus us relying on just our personal narratives, will likely present a more accurate picture of the time, the people and events.
For fun (and to prime the pump), I’d like to share one true Grateful Dead story with you now…
Deadheads are notorious for packing hotel rooms to well beyond capacity. After all, eight people in a room–four on the beds and four on the floor–is the more affordable way to travel. Of course, these configurations don’t exactly favor the hotel, and every once in a while we’d run in to some problems with irate staff.
After a show in Oakland one fine night, me and six or so of my friends, walk from the Coliseum to the nearby Hampton Inn where we are staying. At the front door of the hotel we are confronted, as is every guest, with a barricade and two hotel employees charged with the task of letting just two people per room enter the premises. That we had already checked in, paid in advance, moved in to the room itself, had all our gear up there, etc. didn’t mean a thing to these security stiffs.
I say, “Let me get this right, we check in to your fleabag hotel, go out on the town for the night and now we face a martial law situation at the entrance to the hotel?”
“Two people per room,” repeats the stiff.
I whisper to my friends, “let’s go, they’re not stopping us.” I pass the barricade with its insulting sign-in list, and my friends follow my block to the elevator area in the lobby and up we go. No one follows us, we go about our evening like the semi-normal people we are. But this whole thing is under my skin now. I’m pissed now.
In the morning I wake up, take a shower, put on my best outfit and head down to the lobby. “I’d like to speak to the manager.” He comes to the front and asks what he can do for me. I ask if we can speak in private. He escorts me back to his office. I sit down and begin to question him on last night’s theatrics. He says, “You don’t understand these people.” Long pause. “It’s one thing after the next with these people. Did you know they wash their clothes in the hot tub?”
He doesn’t see me as one of them. I don’t say anything, I just shoot scorn daggers at him with my eyes. Now he sees me. Now he says, “Hold it, you’re one of them. Screw you! You are out of here.”
I pull a piece of flattened cardboard from my pocket. The table tent I brought with me from the room says if I am not 100% satisfied with my stay at Hampton Inn my stay is free. I tell the harried manager I am not even 10% satisfied, as I toss the chain’s cardboard promise onto his otherwise orderly desk.
He stands and so do I. We head head back to the public front desk area, where the manager counts out and returns all the cash we had given up for a four night stay.
“Now get out,” he tells me.
“Gladly.”
I go back upstairs and report to my friends on the happenings below. We quickly pack up after our free night and head down to street to the Oakland Airport Hilton, where the staff have all read Conrad Hilton’s book on hospitality, Be My Guest. It’s actually the start of a long and grateful relationship with this particular Hilton property and Hilton in general. On the other hand, I haven’t stayed in a Hampton Inn room since (even though Hilton acquired the chain in 1999).
Are you suffering from Information Age blues? Drowning in data with no time or inclination to sort through it all? You are not alone.
“The issue nowadays is to some extent the need for good filters, pushing away information after centuries of seeking it,” writes Quentin Hardy, Deputy Tech Editor of The New York Times.
Hardy attended a lecture in Berkeley last week by Harvard’s David Weinberger. Weinberger’s new book, Too Big To Know grapples in part with the problem of too much information. Weinberger also believes that “the Web’s ever-changing structure of links undermines hierarchical analysis by allowing everyone to see and contribute different points of view.”
Since Aristotle, there has been at least lip service to the idea of teleology, a process of discovery that leads to greater and greater understanding. We have invested much of our society in making such a process better.
Now, he said, the model of a protean, ever-linked and ever-changing world is killing that. “The dream of the West has been that we will live together in knowledge, that there is One Knowledge. The Web is saying ‘Nice try,'” Mr. Weinberger said. By its very success we know that “the Internet as a medium is far more like the world we live in” and “the Web is closer to the phenomenological truth of our lives,” he said.
Weinberger responded to Hardy’s article with a post of his own. For one, he thinks the headline in the Times piece is misleading.
“I don’t think the Net is ruining everything, and I am (overall) thrilled to see how the Net is transforming knowledge.”
I shared Hardy’s writeup with my friend DK, who is a professor of philosophy. DK wrote back to say the writer “should have mentioned Nietzsche. This article focuses on epistemology–but there are also social issues involved.”
Detailing one such social issue, DK says it is “interesting to note how the students’ writing skills have plummeted in the last several years. They write in sentence fragments with no command of American English–like they’re sending text messages.”
Which goes to this increasingly difficult issue at the heart of the too much information problem: Who has time to think? When the volume of information is pumping at full throttle, and you are gaming on one large screen, while using a desktop, laptop, tablet and/or phone for other tasks, there’s no time to read or write and no time for measured reflection.
DK is right to be concerned about the deterioration of basic communication skills in his students. And I am right to be concerned that I read fewer books that I once did. Why am I reading fewer books? Because the time I once reserved for reading text on paper is now given over to reading, writing and rearranging text on the screen. Plenty of thought and care go in to these acts, but where is the long arching story that requires deep concentration for hours and days on end? Where is the place in our hectic lives for the literary equivalent of the long walk in the woods? The answer is it is all available — the short form eBooks on every topic under the sun and the long form classics.
I think what our media abundance calls for is a greater degree of media literacy and also some personal restraint. It takes a disciplined reader to tackle Heidegger, Joyce, Yeats, Faulkner and the like. The reader must work for the pay off, as instant gratification, to say nothing of the game layer, is nowhere to be found.
Eugene Register-Guard columnist Bob Welch paid a visit to Ken Kesey’s mom, Geneva Jolley, who turned 95 two weeks ago.
In the interview, Mrs. Jolley reflects on her son’s firsttwo novels…
“When the books came out, they were not red-letter days for me,” Geneva says. “They should have been. But I didn’t appreciate all that he had put into those books. I didn’t appreciate how famous they were going to become.”
She wonders if it was a mother’s protective instincts. “Maybe I didn’t want him to be a big turnip in a little turnip patch,” she says. “He always liked a crowd.”
Mrs. Jolley also says, “I never gave him credit for all he accomplished.”
I hope Kesey understood and I imagine he did. Lavishing praise on a writer, even a famous one in the family, isn’t normal. Asking said writer when he’s going to get a real job, now that’s normal.
Two weeks ago in Boston, author and speaker David Meerman Scott came off the stage at DMA2011 to hand me a copy of the book he co-authored with Brian Halligan of HubSpot.
Interestingly, there’s now another book due to be released about the band’s keen understanding of marketing, which gives me reason to pause. Because marketing wasn’t on the minds of Garcia, Lesh and company. Delivering an exceptional musical experience (product) was the thing that mattered most to Grateful Dead.
My AdPulp colleague, Dan Goldgeier, reviewed the book when it came out last year. Now, having just read the book myself, I’ll share a few thoughts.
I like how the authors identify present-day companies doing the things that the band helped to pioneer, like cultivating community and treating one’s best customers like the VIPs that they are. But I don’t like how there’s an unspoken thought that the managers of today’s companies somehow picked up their best practices from the band. There’s no need to imply a connection in these case studies and I believe the book would be better if this non-link was made more clear.
The book also makes no mention of Grateful Dead’s anti-corporate stance. It was this outsider position that drove a lot of the band’s innovation and do-it-yourself work ethic. Grateful Dead was a successful enterprise not because they knew how to bring their music and lifestyle to market. The band’s music spread from college town to college town and well beyond because the music and the concert experience in particular was extraordinary. This point too often gets glossed over in “How To” books. Scott and Halligan attempt to illustrate how a company today can achieve “viral marketing” success by following in the band’s footsteps. I see the connective fiber and understand why the authors want to help others see it too, but unless you or your company is undertaking the kind of exploratory problem solving that led to 27-minute long “Dark Star” jams, you’re unlikely to experience the same kind of results.
If you’re genuinely interested in the factors that made Grateful Dead hum, explore their decision to live together at 710 Ashbury Street and practice eight plus hours a day. Look into the man that Jerry Garcia was and realize how few musicians are endowed with his relentless dedication to craft. Grapple with the band’s insistence on consensus. Also, admit that LSD had a major role in shaping both the music and the scene. Scott and Halligan mention several times in the book that it’s a marijuana-fueled party, and it is, but that’s far from the whole story. LSD opens minds and frees people to express themselves in ways they’ve never experienced before. Once that happens, people are converted – not just to the band and its music – but to a new way of thinking. When you combine LSD and the band’s hard work and extraordinary talents, the result is magic.
We are right to want to explore the magic and right to keep it alive and growing today, but let’s not get confused when we listen to the music play. A band of this caliber, or a company with a category-defying product or service, hardly needs marketing. When a thing, or a series of performances truly is great, people develop a deep passion for it and actively seek ways to share “their find” with friends. So, if you want to market like Grateful Dead, do it, but don’t expect the magic to happen without a product or service–and an active catalyst–that consistently blows peoples’ minds.
I do appreciate the authors’ willingness to jump into this pond, because there are legitimate themes to explore here. But when the words “Grateful Dead” are attached to something like a business book, the book really has to rock.
The New York Times just introduced me to Jstor, a not–for–profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive of over one thousand academic journals and other scholarly content.
Jstor is in the news because Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old agitator for free access to information on the Internet managed to illegally download more than four million articles and reviews from Jstor, which provides content from the most prestigious — and expensive — scientific and literary journals in the world. Swartz’ act of defiance led to his arrest. He now faces 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for felony counts of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer.
Mr. Swartz is not a run-of-the-mill hacker, says the Times. He has been known for his computer work since he was 14, when he was involved in developing the software behind RSS feeds, which distribute content over the Internet. At the time the investigation began, he was a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, though he was later placed on leave. His friends and supporters are now rallying around him–45,000 have signed a petition on his behalf.
The case against Swartz is a big story, and it’s a blow to the free culture movement. But my interest spiked when I learned that institutions pay tens of thousands of dollars for subscriptions to Jstor, which stands for Journal Storage.
Founded in 1995, Jstor started with 10 journals available to a few American universities and has since expanded to include about 325,000 journal issues available at more than 7,000 institutions. In other words, Jstor is a shining example of a thriving paid content model operating online.
Stewart Brand said, “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
With Jstor in one corner (and Swartz in legal trouble), paid content is looking like a pretty tough competitor.
